


Detention

by powerandpathos



Series: 19 Days After-Shots [1]
Category: 19天 - Old先 | 19 Days - Old Xian
Genre: unwise children, what happens after 'the kiss', wise adults
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-27 00:30:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8380660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powerandpathos/pseuds/powerandpathos
Summary: Sometimes advice comes from the strangest of places. (AKA: 'Did Guan Shan go to his detention?')





	

He should have stopped crying by now. Because he knew people had already seen him. He should have just rubbed his eyes with his shirt sleeve and said it was cigarette smoke or something stronger. He should’ve stopped feeling that weird kind of lump in the back of his throat that made him choke every time he thought of it. Had dubbed it ‘it’, because that was easier than giving it a name right now.

And he didn’t stop when he passed Jian Yi because he thought if Jian Yi asked him what was going on, even when their shoulders collided, a burst of pain that, actually, he was kind of grateful for, he thought he might have just looked at him and sobbed. 

He dind’t know why. Didn’t know why this was getting to him so fucking much. Didn’t know why he’d reacted the way he had when He Tian had done _it_ but he hadn’t been able to stop himself. He could have told him to fuck off and glared and that would have been it – that would have been _easy._ But, apparently, he did not really get to have easy.

‘Mo Guan Shan!’

He glanced behind him, felt his heart wrench for a second because no no no this wasn’t supposed to happen to him right now. Not _now_.

‘You’re supposed to be in detention, Guan Shan, not dallying off to watch the sports activities.’

His voice sounded thick and strange when he said, ‘I wasn’t – I wasn’t  _dallying_.’

He stood still, back to her as she wandered over. He heard her heels clicking on the tarmac. She always walked like she was ready to run. Usually, probably, because that’s what he did.

‘I have had _enough_ of your backchat lately, Guan Shan,’ she said, and his fists tightened at his sides. He felt his throat starting to close up, squeezed his eyes shut because he couldn’t fucking live with himself if he cried in front of the Terminator. 

‘First you attack another student.’ _Click click click._ ‘Then you vandalise school property.’ _Click click click._ ‘And now you won’t even show _any_ respect for the rules of this school and… frankly… I’m…’

He waited for the moment she’d see it, knew that even _she_ wouldn’t be able to quite look him in the eye right now with the state he was in, and when he let out a breath, shuddering and low, opened his eyes, she was frowning at him, letting her beady eyes dart across his face, to his palms that were being cut with the half-moon shape of his nails, to the way, for once, he wasn’t looking at her with the snide defiance that he’d thought she always deserved for being kind of a bitch. 

‘I see,’ she said. And then she said, ‘Is it… Is this about your mother?’

And he laughed. And it was hollow and sharp like a dog bark. 

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Let’s go with that.’

Because that would be easier, wouldn’t it? He wanted easy right now. Wanted, not really, to have to think because everything still felt bruising and burning.

‘Guan Shan–’

‘I said I’m fine.’

And she pursed her lips and said, ‘You didn’t, actually.’

* * *

They went to her classroom, sticky hot even with the windows open, cicadas buzzing quietly, the sound of whistles and cheering and chanting drifting over from the sports pitches and race tracks. She unbuttoned her grey suit jacket and threw it over the back of her chair, and sat down with a sigh, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

Guan Shan had wondered if, without the grey pinstripe and the glasses, Kim Lao Shi might have been pretty. 

‘Have a seat, Guan Shan,’ she said. She’d given him a tissue before leading him to her classroom. Almost, at one point, put a guiding hand on his back before she remembered what sort of teenager he usually was and what sort of person she was. And neither of them were very nice, so she didn’t.

Part of him wanted to sit on the back seat, far right corner by the window, where he usually sat when – if – he turned up to class, but she had that kind of expression on her face and he wasn’t feeling up to being a shit that day. Not then.

So he sat on the second row from the front, and realised the board was pretty clear now, full of English sentences and verb conjunctions, and he probably should have sat there more often if it didn’t go against his idea that eagerness was weakness. 

‘Are you going to talk or will I have to wrench it out of you?’

He sniffed. ‘Whatever.’

She stared; shook her head. _Why do I bother?_

He remembered when she’d told a girl to stop crying in history class once. Said, ‘What, has someone died?’ And the girl had kind of nodded and shuffled on her feet and said, ‘My grandfather.’ 

He remembered the shocked, choked laughter that had risen up around him; the look on Kim Lao Shi’s face. Regret and panic and an overwhelming disinterest in the problems of others. She’d told the girl to leave, to go home, but hadn’t actually apologised. 

‘It’s not like you to be upset, Guan Shan,’ she said. But they both knew when all that shit had gone down with his parents that he had, actually, been kind of upset. But – no. Upset wasn’t the right word. Because he’d started fighting more and got caught with a knife and hadn’t, really, cried. 

‘Just leave it, okay?’ he said now. 

And she sighed, again. Waited. Tapped her short fingernails on the desk. 

And he said, ‘What do you think of He Tian?’

‘He Tian?’ she said, blinking. ‘Well. He’s a good student. Polite. Well-liked. He’s been no more a rule-breaker than most teenage boys.’ She paused. Let her eyes narrow, because she was the sort of woman, the sort of teacher, that always looked behind everything anyone said. 

And that’s probably why he thought he could ask her questions without really asking. Because it meant that she’d get the meaning without him having to really say it. And he needed someone just to get it now, without the pain of reliving it. 

Funny, he thought, that it would be the one he’d spent the past few years tormenting and being punished by and who had actually been there when things started going _wrong_. 

‘What’s he done?’ she said. 

And he said, ‘What’s love?’

‘Christ,’ she muttered, ran a hand through her hair, starting to streak with grey. Leaned back like she knew at some point in her life she’d wanted to be a teacher, but had forgotten why, and was quite sure it hadn’t been to answer questions like this from students like him. ‘Do you need a psych evaluation if you’re asking _me_ this?’

‘Will you just answer?’

‘I haven’t got a clue, Guan Shan. It is the most uniquely complex entity known to man.’ Her look turned dry. ‘And I’m afraid it’s not quite a part of the syllabus I teach.’

‘Can you hurt people you love?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and this time there was no hesitation. Maybe because she was catching onto the idea that he was in some sort of existential mood, that she was willing to indulge him for the afternoon in a classroom that was washed in light and arid heat. Maybe because she knew this. ‘But you don’t hurt them because you love them. If you hurt them to prove your love, or just because you can, then it’s not love. That much I can guarantee.’

‘Do you think teenagers can love?’

‘I’m sure they can. I think, more likely, what they can feel is infatuation. Or a crush. Perhaps it’s the first… stirrings of love that comes later after lived experience and shared interests that are deeper than, I don’t know, music or pop idols or TV celebrities or whatever it is you lot indulge in.’

He nodded to himself, and was aware that she was watching him take all this in. His eyes were starting to sting now from the salt, from the exhaustion of it all, and his throat felt dry. 

‘What’s this all about, Guan Shan?’ she said. Her voice was remakarbly soft for someone as hard as her. He’d her once talking to another teacher outside the Humanities staff room. ‘I’ve got a soft spot for him,’ she’d said, when the teacher had stood and spieled off his detention schedule. A _schedule_. 

‘Because of his parents? There are a lot of troubled kids in this country,’ the teacher had said. ‘They don’t all act out like he does.’

And she’d said, ‘And they don’t all need the kind of help that he does. We’ve got to be patient.’ 

He listened to it with his lip curled, thought how fucking ridiculous they were, how much he hated them – hated _her_. But later, when his knuckles were bleeding and he’d fallen back onto a hard mattress and stared up at a stained ceiling, he’d been, so quietly, grateful. Someone had noticed.

‘Did He Tian do something?’ she said. It hadn’t been difficult to put his questions together – he’d done most of the work for her. 

Guan Shan shrugged.

She said, ‘If he has – if he made you _cry_ , I can–’

‘I don’t want you to do anything, Kim Lao Shi.’

She bit her lip, an absent thing. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I don’t know. Tell me I’m not a fucking weirdo, I guess.’

She gave him a look. ‘You’re not strange for feeling, Guan Shan. It’s actually, in most cultures, encouraged.’

‘Is it? For wanting someone when they treat you like shit? For not hating them as much as you should?’ Now that he had, the more he thought about it, stopped crying and just calmed down, the fear and the anger and that mix of chemicals that had made him kind of lose it, say what he said, had gone. And he realised that he didn’t feel what he should have, and what he wanted to.

And he hated it.

‘Wanting as in…?’

And he just stared at her. Watched, slowly, as realisation dawned.

‘Christ,’ she said again. ‘I do not get paid enough for this shit…’ She looked outside. The school brass band had started playing, and a hot breeze fluttered through the windows, disturbing the papers on her desk, the posters peeling away from the walls. ‘I can’t… I want to talk to you about this, Guan Shan. I should be able to. I should be able to give you that kind of care and consideration. But I could lose my job. You know the position I’m in…’

‘I get it,’ he said, even if he didn’t really. Didn’t understand quite why the world that he lived in worked the way it did. He stood up, thanked her for the tissues, left the packet on her desk. 

She was still sitting, just watching him with some strange look when he paused at the door and said, ‘When do you want me to do my detention?’

And she let out a whoosh of air, offered him something like a smile, and said, ‘I think this has been punishment enough for us both, don’t you think?’

He chewed the inside of his cheek. ‘Yeah,’ he said, thought that sticking sunflower seed peels to the window had felt like a fucking lifetime ago. ‘Probably.’


End file.
